Scotius

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Ah, y'know... i don't want to bring the wrath of moderator team on my head. Gun - toting xenophobic, brainwashed psychopath threatening violence and blatant disregard of human rights and freedom of speech? It seemed a bit much. Though this might be just enough to convince some ignoramuses that space exist, and orbit can be... useful.

Guys... stay away from this conspiracist rabbit hole. You will find only frustration and madness there Recenty i had a misfortune of watching two such reality deniers trash-talking failed landing of Beresheet lander. Level of their ignorance AND arrogance left me speechless. Even worse - they dared to name drop Kerbal Space Program as an example of "space fakery". You can guess how affronted i was...

Using water as an propellant, or rather reaction mass does have sense. Water IS cheap and plentiful everywhere (almost) beyond Earth's orbit. Insulate it, and you can keep it frozen as long as you need, without worrying about boiloff (looking at ya there, hydrogen ). But... to get any serious mileage out of this heavy, dense lump of mass you need a ridiculously strong drive. Orion drive for example. Or saltwater nuclear engine. I guess maybe conventional thermal reactor of very high power could do in a pinch. Turn a small lake of water into sufficiently hot plasma and you're ready to go anywhere you want But chemical rocket? Or even electric one? No - i don't see it happening. Well... you could use it as a fuel source i guess. Just find a space iceberg floating around, drag it somewhere convenient, pour a lot of electricity into electrolysis factory and enjoy your fresh oxygen and hydrogen.

Moon base first, supported by space station(s) in Earth's orbit. We need to learn how to deal with environment beyond relatively safe LEO. We need to learn how to build and maintain long - term habitats. We need to learn how to do ISRU properly. Building proper space industry would go a long way towards making sure, this time we'll plant more than just couple of flags outside of Earth too

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It's not only USA. Broadband internet access is spotty in Europe too. Cities are mostly in good shape, but rural areas have much more limited options. While i do have optic fiber connected (after years of suffering excrementsty signal reception from radio access), my brother living couple of kilometers away on the outskirts of our town, is practically at the mercy of phone companies. He applied to the same provider i use, but they just shrugged - "Sorry Mr.Xyz - but you live too far from existing cable network, and in your neighbourhood there isn't enough potential clients to justify the investment in a new line and all necessary hardware. Sucks to be you."

Too much useless atmospheric junk. This is far superior, though still not ideal:

Silence from Elon & SpaceX is... unusual and disconcerting. Only time when they collectively went mum like this i can remember, is Bulgariasat failed landing.

That sounds badS But wouldn't it require overhaul of station's power grid?

Or... you could adapt a BFR for lunar landing by removing all 'atmospheric' elements, decreasing number of Merlins and even reducing the amount of propellant onboard. Still huge, but it could do everything you would want from a lander - and then some more

Also, barge wouldn't probably take it well. It's one thing to blast a concrete launch pad with exhaust gases. It was built to shrug it off. But the deck of a ship is not the best place to light a huge bonfire.

I have a feeling he's not entirely joking about wings. It wouldn't be the first proposal of a slow, long, low temperature reentry using gliding. They go back to beginnings of spaceflight. And they make sense: less heating = thinner skin = less mass.

Because civilian vessels do not enjoy such luxury. Only an entry in Lloyd's Register.

No. We need those guys and their unique way of dealing with space junk: No space mines though.

Looks like it's time to start building Toyboxes. Oh, pardon.

Yeah, it's LOX tank insides in microgravity. Very cool bubbles. Literally It's liquid oxygen in freefall.

That was FREAKING AMAZING!!! Go SpaceX! Second launch - full success!

Bob. We all know it has to happen one day

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_energy This little thing ensures there is not, and can not be a perfect vacuum. There's always something. Nature abhors vacuum - indeed

Or we can play with nucleotides and McGyver our own bizarre and exotic lifeforms. https://www.livescience.com/64829-hachimoji-dna.html Yeeessss... lab-created synthetic DNA with twice as many nucleotide pairs as our own. What can go wrong?

"Pepsi or Coca-Cola?"

That will probably depend on nature of found life. If it will be microscopic organisms, after initial sensation passes nobody but scientists will care. If this life will be of cute and cuddly kind, i'd expect it to become new king of internet memes and inspiration for a deluge of tacky toys and cartoons. If it turns out to be toothy, aggressive and hungry... Hollywood and game companies will have field day flooding the market with action flicks and survival horrors. That's about it as far as general public will be involved Father Universe... when did i become so cynical?

True. That's why i remain sceptical about Artificial Intelligence when i read articles about "awesome achievements" in this field. Like the program winning against GO archmaster or something else. It's still not intuitive learning - you can't tell the program how flight and orbital mechanics work (even in broad strokes), and what it's trying to achieve. It's still brute-forcing "Put this rocket in 70 km x 70 km circle with 0 inclination" by the way of throwing stuff in random directions and waiting until something sticks.

Very interesting idea. Although... Last summer i watched a stream on Twitch of someone trying exactly that. Teach AI how to launch rockets in KSP. And i have to say - i wasn't impresed. This experiment ran for weeks i think, and when i watched it for the last time, i couldn't notice any visible progress. Bot was launching the rocket in seemingly random directions and random angles just as it did on day one. Maybe you can track this stream in Twitch archives and gain some ideas from it?